📈 How are companies using AI?

➜ Fraud Surfaces as the #1 Use Case for AI in Finance. Banking co-operative Swift is working on AI pilots to tackle cross-border payments fraud. So far, 10 global banks have joined the initiative to analyze anonymously-shared data to sniff out potential fraud. The group includes BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, DNB, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Standard Bank.

Finextra

➜ Sony Wants AI to Cut Film Costs. Despite potential conflicts with Hollywood creatives, Sony’s CEO Tony Vinciquerra aims to leverage AI to streamline film production and cut costs. Popcorn anyone? 

IndieWire

➜ PwC Has Just Become OpenAI’s Biggest Customer. OpenAI signed 100,000 PwC workers to ChatGPT’s enterprise tier as the management consulting company becomes OpenAI’s first resale partner. 

WSJ

➜ AI in Manufacturing. Swiss startup, EthonAI, has just raised $16.5 million. The startup promises it can train AI models for specific use cases, e.g., helping manufacturers find surface defects in products. Judging from recent VC fund rounds, AI in manufacturing seems to be less hyped and more tangible.

TechCrunch

➜ Another AI Addon on Amazon TV. AI may not know if life is like a box of chocolates, but it can recognize the source of the quote. Amazon is rolling out an AI-powered search feature to Fire TV that will enable Alexa to answer open-ended questions about TV shows and movies, e.g., users could ask Alexa to find psychological thrillers with surprise endings. 

TechCrunch

➜ GPT-4 Prices Dropped ~90% in 6 Months. From $60 down to less than $8 per million tokens. It’s the new version, GPT-4o, and the batch option that made the difference. The pace is crazy; see the chart for more details.

💡 What are the nerds up to?

➜ AI Headphones Can Listen to a Single Person From a Crowd. A team of researchers at the University of Washington has developed an AI system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a single person in a crowd and isolate this person’s voice from all the other sounds.

University of Washington

➜ AI Is Not That Energy Greedy As Portrayed? A well documented opinion on why AI demand is NOT going to create a sustained surge in energy consumption.

X

➜ AI for Parents with a Knack for App Building. A parent built an app in Elixir, using Replicate, Huggingface, and OpenAI to help his 4-year-old son practice his letter sounds and learn to read starter words. The author explained that other apps felt overproduced and more like entertainment than education.

Zanki

➜ Sound Effects With a Prompt. A new tool from Eleven Labs lets users write a prompt for the specific kind of sound effect they need, e.g., explosions. 3,2,1… boom!

TheVerge

➜ GPT-4 Achieves Adult Human Performance at Theory of Mind (ToM). Theory of Mind is the human ability to reason about multiple mental and emotional states in a recursive manner. To put it simply, all this "I think that you believe that she knows" stuff is now available to GenAI.

Arxiv

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